I love your application. It deserves a page of its own. Every
page of your site starts by including the Application.cfm code. I
am assuming that you would not want the weather code to run on
every page. Also, you should beef up your cfapplication tag a
little. Here is an idea. The second test answers your question
about caching, and says more besides.

My first instinct is that it has less to do with cfdump and
more to do with the broken connection. When you cut internet access
the img tag can no longer connect to the URL
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/images/symbols/animated_sym/10.gif.
That URL is the value of the parameter
application.weather_xml.rss.channel.image.url.xmlText, which then
becomes undefined.

I am getting the following error Intermittently on the page,
(sometimes the page works fine for hours other times it is much
less than that -any ideas ?

-------ERROR------
The system has attempted to use an undefined value, which
usually indicates a programming error, either in your code or some
system code.
Null Pointers are another name for undefined values.
---------------------

I have been trying this, but I am still getting the following
intermittant error

The web site you are accessing has experienced an unexpected
error.
Please contact the website administrator.

The following information is meant for the website developer
for debugging purposes.

Error Occurred While Processing Request
The system has attempted to use an undefined value, which
usually indicates a programming error, either in your code or some
system code.
Null Pointers are another name for undefined values.

Any ideas on why I am getting the error ? Is it to do with
the feed the code or the CF server ?

I tried using CFTRY / CATCH around the code so that if the
feed is not displaying correctly instead of showing the error it
would show the text 'Feed is currently unavailable' but have not
got this working